Sunday, 29 April 2007

Stumbling around the internet - as is my job when in my dressing gown on a Sunday afternoon - I came across 43 things. A random website to be sure. I find it amusing just to refresh and see what people are doing. The most popular one I've come across so far is - ironically - to stop procrastinating. A surprising number of people want tattoos too. I just don't see the attraction.

Thursday, 26 April 2007

There are worse ideas. Currently I can only think of two: jumping into a volcano and ... and I really can't even think of a second.

In other news, I feel embarrassed when I watch romantic comedies. Like even when there's nobody home and there's no chance that anyone will ever know it's still... it still seems wrong. This is bothersome. It's part of why I stopped Bridget Jones so early in the piece.

I'm watching Bridget Jones 2. Because sometimes you just have to. Regardless of the administrative law essays, administrative law journals, assignments and other such things due but not yet done. Well, I've had enough of working. I know I shouldn't but... I totally, totally have...

I just want to live a life that involves reading xkcd followed by eating chocolate cake and bagels. I don't mind occasionally doing something productive with my life, like treasury work or something, but... well, I just don't want to write essays on things I don't know anything about. This is why I prefer criminal law. I actually go to those lectures.

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

I was thinking about asking The Lovely Clara to do a guest blog for me. I really need to blog and I'm pretty lazy, so surely that works well. I decided, however, that I should reserve the "privilege" for a girlfriend. We can be all coupley and have sloppy makouts and share a blog and stuff. How disgusting would that be? That's totally the sort of thing I'd do too...

Which brings me nicely to the next point. We'll call this a segue because that's a cool word.

I don't have a girlfriend. I want a girlfriend but there's not a lot of hope for me. I see the reason behind this to be the way things work nowadays. It seems that in adult relationships, or relationships involving people my age, tend to start with going on the prowl for sex. If you find someone else looking for sex, you sleep together and then later start to like each other. Ok, so perhaps extreme, but you see my point: you're seeking a relationship before knowing the person. Unfortunately, the alternative also doesn't sound good: find someone you like, befriend them and later proposition them. So here I am in a quandary. I don't know how to go about finding a relationship. I'm reminded of the bash.org quote comparing being rejected by a girl to being rejected for a job. I'm also thinking for some reason about the difficulty I have in remembering who people think I like - it differs between social groups. And who do I actually like? God knows. When I find out I might put it here.

Hockey Tasmania is a fairly large organisation. They are pretty important - they had the Premier open their new gagillion dollar stadium just yesterday. Sure, they're not quite as big as the YMCA, who also hired me to do a website, on whom I also defaulted, but they're fairly big. I woke up this morning and decided to get this website done. It would only take a day of dedicated work.

I've been up for two hours now. I have the Powderfinger song Baby I've Got You On My Mind stuck in my head. I also kind of have a person on my mind, but that's not the thing.

Thursday, 12 April 2007

It's five in the morning and I'm just about to go to bed. I have a tutorial at ten, so I'll have to be up in three and a half hours.

Yesterday was Pat's birthday so this is the end of spending a birthday evening. I didn't drink. I did play Singstar far too much. We talked about many things. And I'm going to run for Kingborough Council.

There's also a bit in here about unintentionally offending The Lovely Clara by implying something that's not true through accidental action, but we'll get to that, and details about Council, later. Now, sleep.

I have been thinking recently about things I find attractive in a girl. By recently I mean over the past five or so minutes. I've come up with something interesting. I like girls who I can teach.

This means several things. Firstly it means they must be smart and interested. Passionately curious, as Einstein would have said. They're allowed to roll their eyes when I start talking mathematics gibberish but they listen anyway because a bit of extra knowledge is good. I don't want to dominate, and I don't want them to be stupid or ignorant, I just want to be able to participate in a conversation and impart some knowledge or understanding. This is pretty much the prime requirement; the others are all about capacity (i.e. no absurd age difference, must be single, must be straight or bisexual etc) or preference (i.e. smarter is better).

This is dangerous for a few reasons. It means my ego is one of the most important things to me and must be massaged at all times. It means I desire a relationship on an unequal intellectual or regarding-knowledge footing and this can only be because I want to see myself as better than the other party. None of this is good, but it's not the really bad. The really bad is that this probably means I'll like more than my peers my subordinates. Delegates at conferences where I'm a facilitator. Students where I'm a teacher. Trainees where I'm a coach. This is getting close to paedophilia and it worries me greatly.

Monday, 9 April 2007

It is estimated - and quite well, really; I've examined the methodology - that less than 15% of sexual assault cases are even reported to police. Of those, more than two thirds are not recorded by police as sexual crimes - they are either dismissed, reclassified as common assault or the like.

The person I'm talking to at the moment has said that she wouldn't report a rape. She's evidently with about 85% of the population. If we be generous and say she's with only 10% of the population, let's look at how this pans out. That puts her as part of one million women and girls in Australia. The victimisation rate for sexual assault crimes is conservatively 2%. Which means that twenty thousand - 20,000 - sexual assaults go unreported each year. If we say that 1% of sexual assault crimes are rapes - again, a very conservative estimate (when talking about reported crimes; this is where we get fuzzy) - that means that at least 200 women are raped each year in Australia and don't say anything.

You have no idea how much that horrifies me. To give you a clue, I put it up there with the stories my uncle tells about paracetamol overdoses. Specifically, about young mothers who want to stop their babies from crying so give them children's panadol. But it doesn't work, so they give them more. They come to the emergency room eventually, but the baby is now going into multiple organ failure and will die in two days, at best.

I know that there is no altruism. I know this for a very simple reason. Milk. Specifically, everybody gets the milk that expires latest. Even I do. I know we'll drinking it before the expiry date, but we get the "freshest" anyway, despite the waste that it causes. Every time I buy milk I think about this and decide that no, I'll be bad anyway. It'll be fine, surely.

Saturday, 7 April 2007

I'm watching the movie form of the sisterhood of the travelling pants. I don't know why I do this to myself. I guess... well, let's look at this. I have a few movies on my computer I haven't seen yet (the sisterhood being one which I'm currently seeing). They are:

- A Walk To Remember- House of Flying Daggers- Pride and Prejudice- The Notebook- Wallace and Gromit - Curse of the Ware Rabbit

There's also Magnolia, which I haven't seen in a long time. Then there are the movies I watched last night: A Fish Called Wanda, How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days and The Girl Next Door.

But I'm not here to talk about all the movies I have, or those which I want to watch. This is about why I do this to myself.

Ok, firstly, this movie is not just a chick flick, it's a mid-teen sappy chick flick. Like, we're talking uberdespicablepop tween trash. Which isn't to say it's a bad movie - at 39'14" I'm unwilling to make that judgement. I mean, it's embarrassing. I feel shame (even without another, so fuck you Satre) that I'm watching this.

But that's not the real problem. That's not why I shouldn't be watching this. I shouldn't be watching this because it almost made me cry in the first few scenes. I shouldn't be watching this because it's all about precisely the life that I keep being certain I've totally missed. I shouldn't watch this because it reinforces the mood which made me watch it in the first place - and that mood is best described as borderline depressed.

I got a call from an old friend of mine tonight. The company he started and is running is paying for him and eight employees under him, also mostly old friends, to spend six days at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Flights, alcohol, hotels, shows all paid. Good quality, five-star hotels too. I could have been working there. But instead I chose to come back here and go to university. Sometimes I wonder about why I made such a bad decision. Maybe it wasn't horrible, generally... but I should've stayed. Life would have been better eventually, I'm sure. Perhaps. Uncertainty haunts me still.

Friday, 6 April 2007

I'm at a party. An adults party. Blogging from my phone. I'm totallyastounded by how shallow conversation is. These people are lawyers.One is a supreme court judge. And they're all fuckwits. Not quiteall... but a surprisingly large number of them.

I tonight had a phone conversation with The Lovely Clara of nearly two hours. It was good. One of the topics of discussion - there were obviously many, ranging from the pornography to the value of strip clubs - was high school. Specifically my whole general feeling that I missed out on some important social aspect. I for a long time thought it was a relationship aspect but I've just realised what it was. It was precisely what I just had with TLC - long phone conversations. More specifically, calling someone just to talk to them. The other bit I was missing I get in nine hours when I leave the house for Julia's - just going around to someone's house because you're going around to someone's house. That's what I missed, I think, and I really did miss out. I like people a lot more than I let on. Or something. Point here is we talked and it was good. Yay.